By Enrique Mas
At the start of this covert WWIII in the North Atlantic on 1982, the bad weather and also the political uncertitude precludes the use of air and surface assets. To keep low the social unrest because the war, the opening naval actions are limitated to the discrete submarine operations, in a situation remembrance of the 1939 Phony War and of the 1994 Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor (where both Japan and the United States are in war against the other, but both governments are occulting the fact to his respective public opinions to prevent the collapse of the stock markets), but these underwater actions are not less decisive or murderous than on a full open war.
A submarine-only scenario without other diversions, inspired by some old scenario booklets of the Harpoon 3 series, good for testing submarines (specially the new ones of the HCDB-110831), submarine tactics, sonars, torpedoes and other ASW weapons. Perhaps the Western submarines are numerically over-represented, but it's reflecting the original and very reduced in number of submarines paper scenarios. Also it's configured as a vanilla scenario for lazy players wanting to enjoy a simple pastime, and with the aim of replayability thanks to the aleatority of the starting positions and of the units presence or not presence. I think it's playable at the 10 or even 30 minutes time compression ... before any contact.
This scenario is designed for the EC2003 Battle for the GIUK Battleset and the official HCE database (HCDB-111211 or later).
You can download the scenario and database from HarpGamer.